Eldritch

Consider consistency and valuing consent. You would laugh at any western country exonerating themselves. But the narrative from a country that consistently heavily violates consent. Forcing compliance through bullying and threats. Regularly jailing and threatening journalists, while doing everything they can to opaquely control the narrative. That you accept? And no, the United States and the West aren’t immune to such criticism themselves.

I believe victims, whether they are victims of the West, or victims of China, or Russia, or Ukraine, or Japan or England etc. I personally have met victims most ML deny existence of. I know of someone specifically trapped just outside of shenzhen. Who would have left the country if they could have. But their partner is uhyger and not allowed to leave or even travel. They were personally threatened by the government for even talking about it on an international platform. And that isn’t even going into the friends and family their government has disappeared.

Do I believe that many in the West don’t really care about what happens to those in China. Just useing it hypocritically as an attack? Absolutely. Just as most ML typically feign to care about those in Palestine or other places. So long as they can be considered victims of the West. But that doesn’t mean that victims of the West or Eastern bloc don’t exist. Or that I believe the groups in power when they try to scrub and whitewash their history.

But what do I know, right? I’m not a campist. Just an anarchist in their 50s.

And?

Ever heard that if you swapped Lenin for Trump and the West with the deep state. You’d be indistinguishable from a magat. There’s no such thing as perfect governance. Not in the United States, UK, and certainly not in China.

This need to turn every failing for your in group into a conspiracy theory against them. is the signature of a weak mind not concerned with facts or truth.

The United States literally has been in war with the UK at times. Admittedly, it’s been a while. They’ve never been an indivisible unit. And right or wrong the UK had a front row seat to watch the goings on in China for many decades from Hong Kong.

If China wanted to be taken seriously, perhaps they shouldn’t “checks notes” imprison a journalists for talking to a diplomat. Or generally assign government minders, to control what journalist have access to. Perhaps especially, they should be more open to foreign press. Then it wouldn’t always be the CCP’s position and everyone else’s. But who am I kidding. Of course, it’s everyone else’s fault. The entire world all in on a deep state plot to make you look bad.

Also many of the sources are 404s, or seem to link to different articles, or actually don’t contradict the general narrative. Also some random guys patreon. Gotta say I’m convinced.

Huh, today I learned that the US state department runs/funds the UK government and the BBC. Alternate reality history is fascinating.

No, not at all. For using “the West” as a crutch to deflect all blame from your in groups. There isn’t one China, much less one West. More than anything, though, it is a tongue in cheek nod to the servers favorite deflection. Sinophobia.

It’s also easy to find links to the United States or those in the West to exonerating themselves of things they’ve done. That doesn’t mean I believe them.

Not at all. As an American and a westerner who’s family has suffered at the hands of the government. That’s easy, though you may want to check your Anglophobia. Campism and hypocrisy is the hard bit to swallow. Where when two groups do similar things but one is accepted or at least excused because they’re “your” camp right or wrong.

That is the stance of the server that hosts this community. Make of that what you will. There’s a reason most avoid it.

Yeah, with bazzite, kinoite, silverblue etc flatpak was always part of the equation. We opt into it. Canonical with snaps violated consent. They showed up and that was that. You got no choice. Had Canonical created a sub distro built on and testing these. There would have been a lot less ire. Instead like these new rust core utils. Everyone is an unpaid beta tester.

Snaps. Snaps are the, and a good reason. Canonical has done a very poor job with them. Whether it was trying to keep control over them, the duplication of work, the performance issues etc. There’s lots of reasons.

I wouldn’t insult someone for using Ubuntu, like I wouldn’t insult someone for using Manjaro. But I wouldn’t shy away from recommending better distributions when applicable. I think most of us have been through them all over the years. It’s kind of a rite of passage.

The group behind it or others similar. When you are on a small self hosted instance. You are at the mercy of a hobby admins time and skill. Which is no dig at them. Sometimes it just becomes too much.

I have had a number of Mastodon accounts since 2017 with the groups Mastodon servers. They run themselves as a serious organization. Providing services of a quality absolutely worth paying for. All with donations.

Yes, 100% this. I use both of them regularly. A lot of new releases are on band camp and not even on discogs anymore. But combined with music brains Picard, they are awesome.

Firearms are a double edged sword. Maybe they help, maybe they hurt. But when society turns against you, and no place is safe for you. All the guns in the world even in the face of an unarmed populace won’t save you.

Violence is the answer for authoritarians. But it never lasts. Because it’s just a tool. The answer is respect, justice, and consent.

Without them you end up in inane cycles of violence like we have now.

And even there. There’s no guarantee. Going to Europe where fascists in Russia, Hungary, etc loom? Maybe you’ll be safe a little longer somewhere on the Asian continent with the currently slower rolling fascist forces there. But it’s only temporary. You can’t ultimately escape.

The question is. Where well the breaking point be for most people. What event will cause the public to drag these fuckers from their homes and hold them responsible. Because that’s what it’s going to take. For them to remember that they rely on us. Not only for their wealth. But continued existence. Only when that fear has been driven into them, will things even start to get better.

And it might surprise us. It may just be a red state that does it. One of these Republican sycophants getting dragged from a town hall. Assaulted by a whole community for their rolls in making things worse for everyone. Police are going to have a hard time locking up a whole town. And these elected ghouls that love to ignore their constituents will reel in terror. To be clear, violence isn’t the answer. Fear is. The fear of knowing we far outnumber them. That they could be subject to violent accountability at any moment. Dragged from their safe beds even.

Sometimes there’s family or other things you just can’t take with you. Support structures you might not have somewhere else. Friends and neighbors. Mutual aid.

There can be circumstances that override that. But honestly, the more that flee. The easier it is to get what the fascists want. And at best you’re only helping yourself short term. Because no matter where you go. They will come for you if they can.

Debian testing exists. It’s just not well promoted or publicly presented for that matter. But it’s not really any further behind than Ubuntu.

Also open suse tumbleweed. Is great. When you want something more up to date than fedora. But don’t want large chunks of your operating system to stop functioning randomly on an update like Arch. Because they pushed an intentionally breaking change, but nothing to fix it. And you happened not to read all 1000 change logs for the update, missing the relevant one.

I love Arch, but I wouldn’t touch it for desktop these days. I seriously don’t have the bandwidth to read 1000s of change logs every couple days. On an appliance or server? Sure. Most recently VLC stopped playing mkv files. Why?! A packaging change. Instead of a few large packages/dependencies. They were all broken out granularly. Which is fine. But since you didn’t have all the new packages installed before. All functionality moved to them just went poof. I don’t have enough fingers to count the times this sort of thing has happened over the years. It’s part of why i’m slowly transitioning to tumbleweed on most of my desktop systems from Arch.

Upon better reading it absolutely was. Disregard me.

They exist yes. Go ask the average person on the street the name more than one of them. At best some might know system 76. But can they buy them at the local best buy, apple store, or micro center? Lots of places don’t have a micro center. Micro center at least sells Linux and BSD media. I haven’t been in 8 months. But for the last 30 years they haven’t sold a pre installed system. Much less best buy or apple store.

Yep, reliability and popularity. There’s still plenty of space for it. But I think piefed has kind of come in and sucked up all the extra oxygen in the room for the moment.